I can never find it.
Because the truth is there was never a version of this where Toren Kellar was safe and I was honest.
I chose her safety.
I will stand by that choice until whatever comes for me finally arrives.
I got into that car the night of the crash because I didn't trust Masen to be alone with her.
That is the truth I have never said out loud to a single living person.
Not to Caspian. Not to Fiona. Not in any of the debrief sessions where I sat across from people with government badges and dead eyes, recounting a version of that night so carefully edited it was almost fiction. I told myself it was my duty. Loyalty. The right thing. But underneath all of that, stripped of every justification I have ever dressed it in, the real reason was simpler and far more inconvenient.
I just wanted more time with her.
And that decision, that one small, selfish, human decision, is the thing I will carry to my grave.
It cost four people everything.
After Kenna. After Emery. After Neave and Miles.
I watched Xaden Devlin absorb his grief and turn it into something cold, deliberate and aimed. I watched the boy I once played against become the kind of man who weaponizes his own darkness. That particular devastation doesn't weep. It calculates. It waits. It sharpens itself in the quiet and when it finally moves, it moves with the kind of precision that leaves nothing standing.
He would never stop. I knew it the moment I looked into his eyes and saw not grief but purpose. He would pull at every thread until the whole thing unravelled and took everyone near down with it.
Including her.
I couldn't let that happen.
So I made a deal with a woman I should never have trusted with my name.
Deputy Director Fiona Williams doesn't negotiate. She doesn't compromise. She identifies what you love most and she places it on the table between you and she waits for you to fold. I knew exactly what she was doing when I sat across from her. I did it anyway because the alternative was watching Toren walk into a war with nothing but the truth, a target on her back and absolutely no idea how deep the water was beneath her feet.
I got her immunity.
I got his.
I told myself it was enough.
I have been lying to myself for a very long time.
The burner phone vibrates in my pocket. Not my daily, the one only two people in the world have the number for, and one of them is currently making my life significantly more complicated than it needs to be.
Him.
I answer on the second ring.
“Yeah.”
“Can't make the meet.” His voice is tight. Fraying. The sound of a man being pulled in directions he didn't agree to when he signed up for this.
I press down the cold spike of irritation. “She needed us both. She wants this wrapped up before?—”
“Before what?” he cuts across me. “Before it all blows up in our faces? Little late for that.” A pause, heavy and loaded. “Want to trade places? Want to spend every day knowing one wrong word and everything comes down? I'm bleeding for this too, Kellan. Don't you dare stand there and act like you're the only one with skin in the game.”
“Then stop withholding intel?—”
“Fuck. You.”
